The New Yorks Time

Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue

A stronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a
host star.

An artist’s impression of a free-floating planet, untethered from a star’s gravity, in space. Credit...NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center

By Katrina Miller
Published Aug. 6, 2023Updated Aug. 7, 2023

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Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in

roaming the universe unfettered by any host star
— don’t just pop into existence in the middle of
cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same
way other planets do: within the swirling disk of
gas and dust surrounding an infant star.
But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds
get violently chucked out of their celestial
neighbourhoods.
The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have
deduced that these planets are six times more
abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and
they identified the second Earth-size free floater
ever detected.

Japan are upping the these planets were about the

estimate to trillions. size of Jupiter, our solar
Astronomers had once The existence of wandering system’s most massive planet.
calculated that billions of worlds orphaned from their But that conclusion garnered a
planets had gone rogue in the star systems has long been lot of pushback; even scientists
Milky Way. Now, scientists at known, but poorly who announced it found it
NASA and Osaka University in understood. Previous surprising.
findings suggested that most of
To better study these rogue their gravity warped and planet candidates. (Data
worlds, David Bennett, an magnified the light arriving from one of those candidates
astronomer at the NASA from faraway stars behind was compelling enough for the
Goddard Space Flight Centre, them, an effect known as team to claim the discovery of
and his team used nine years microlensing. a new rogue Earth.) From this
of data from the Microlensing With help from empirical analysis, they estimate that
Observations in Astrophysics models, the researchers there are about 20 times more
telescope at the University of worked out the spread of the free-floating worlds in our
Canterbury Mount John masses for more than 3,500 Milky Way than stars, with
Observatory in New Zealand. microlensing events, which Earth-mass planets 180 times
Exoplanets were indirectly included stars, stellar more common than rogue
detected by measuring how remnants, brown dwarfs and Jupiter
.
The conclusion that most Bennett said. That’s because of the impact is so strong that
rogue worlds are small makes planets are thought to go it knocks one out of the
more sense than the idea that rogue when two protoplanets emerging star system
they are Jupiter-size, Dr. slam into each other. The force altogether.
But planets can be kicked out of their star systems only by larger objects. If most of these stellar orphans
were Jupiter-size, a lot of so-called super-Jupiters must be orbiting host stars — but those are scarce. On
the other hand, these results suggest that lower mass planets are the ones at risk of ejection.

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Space Names
Janus Luna
Flora Tina
Phoenix Nova

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